Comics/U
Ulysses Bloodstone Ulysses Bloodstone was born at the dawn of modern man and lived within a tribe in Scandinavia. Ten-Thousand years ago, an extradimensional being known as Ulluxy'l Kwan Tae Syn appeared on Earth carrying the Hellfire Helix - a totem from another dimension possessing great power. Ulluxy'l kept the Helix encased within a protective crystal. The gemstone was sentient however, and developed an overwhelming desire to conquer the Earth. To this end, it required a native life form to serve as its agent. Ulluxy'l lured Ulysses Bloodstone to its lair and offered him a portion of the gem's power. Irradiated by the bloodstone, the hunter was endowed with superhuman strength. Returning to his tribe, he demonstrated his power, and told his awestruck people how they too might acquire his gift. The entire tribe accompanied him back to Ulluxy'l's lair and were arranged in formation before the gem. The bloodstone bombarded the assembled human beings with its energies, psychically absorbing their minds while killing their bodies. When Bloodstone realized what was happening, he lunged upon the gem, causing it to explode into hundreds of fragments. One of these geometrically perfect pieces embedded itself into Bloodstone's sternum; the others were scattered across the planet. The hunter's entire tribe had been destroyed by the evil power of the Helix, but he himself had become virtually immortal. Dedicating himself to exacting revenge upon the being he held responsible for his people's death, he eventually took the name Ulysses Bloodstone. Un-Men The evil scientist Anton Arcane manipulated the genetic stock of random humans, creating a subspecies race of mutated freaks. These freaks, termed the Un-Men, often followed Arcane's orders, but were typically too dim-witted to think for themselves. Arcane's earliest experiments with the Un-Men took place in Berlin, Germany in 1945 when Arcane served as a Nazi officer. He used human resources from concentration camps to stitch together his first prototype experiments. Decades later, Alec Holland, better known as the Swamp Thing, first encountered the Un-Men while fighting Arcane in his ancestral castle in Bavaria. He later encountered an older group of Un-Men living in the swamps of New Orleans. In February of 1969, the United States government sent a team of scientists under the auspices of the United States Army to New Orleans to investigate Un-Men sightings. The project leader was a geneticist named Doctor David Manguy. They rounded up a group of Un-Men and sequestered them inside of an old barracks. Manguy's team performed various experiments on the Un-Men including, but not limited to, vivisection. While the motives of the other scientists remain unknown, Manguy believed that by studying these tortured creatures, he could divine a means to cure all physical deformities. To this end, the team began breeding Un-Men, giving rise to a second generation of abnormal mutations. With fresh genetic stock to work with, Manguy developed a serum that would isolate and ultimately destroy the trace elements that caused random physical deformities. Of the second generation of Un-Men, only thirteen survived the process, and of those thirteen, only one appeared to respond positively to the treatment - Damien Kane. Kane appeared as a normal, healthy baby boy. The United States Army monitored Kane for the next two decades. They never revealed his true origins to him, and even fabricated his past, telling him that his parents died in a plane crash over Central America. In 1994 however, that process that kept Kane's human appearance began to go into regression. He was brought to Doctor Manguy's office, and the guilt-ridden doctor finally told Damien the truth about his Un-Men heritage. Una Una was a mental patient at Ravenscar Secure Hospital in England. She was a friend of John Constantine. She later became a photographer and was residing in the village of Thursdyke. John hitchhiked to Thursydke, and met up with Una, who invited him to attend a parade that was taking place in the village. The parade was occurring at the same time that many of the townspeople were actively protesting the establishment of a missile base in their community.